Recently, there is proposed a printing control system having a function of managing a network printer while a computer and printing control application cooperate with each other, a function of monitoring the use state of a network, and a function of scheduling print data.
The printing control system controls the order of print requests from a computer, tracks jobs from the start of a print request to the end of printing, and notifies the user of a print status in detail (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-134139).
This control system can control printing by job scheduling, but takes a long time for the first printing (printing on the first sheet while the device is idle) owing to an additional process associated with job scheduling. More specifically, a scheduling process including registration of a requested job, monitoring of the device status, and a printing start instruction is time-consuming. The process time becomes longer than that when no scheduling is performed.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-134139 discloses a printer which assigns priority to print data and prints data of high priority without any standby time. However, the disclosed technique does not solve an increase in first print time.